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Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Early resolution talk

Way back in 2013, I posted my one goal (resolution), I still haven't completed it. It was to own a home. It's not because of lack of trying though. We've been trying since then. In a little over a month it will be 3 years of trying.

We started off just trying to raise our credit scores. Mine was trashed before and then on top of that, my divorce trashed it more because the Ex doesn't pay anything off so I had to pay off everything that was hers but had my name on it as well. Cheri just didn't have a score because she had filed for bankruptcy when she got divorced. She was divorced sooner than I was but the bankruptcy was one of those that you pay off in payments so she didn't get credit for it until it was payed off. The problem was, when she moved up here to be with me, her Ex stopped paying his half and we had to pay it off as well. Basically, the exes screwed us, royally.

At the beginning of this year, we were finally approved to buy a house. The problem now, was finding one that we wanted. We have specific things we want in a home because we have no intention of ever moving again. We are 42 years old and we plan on dying here.

Our needs

Decent sized kitchen with lots of counter space. Cheri spends quite a bit of time in the kitchen between suppers and occasionally baking. Our apartment has no counter space so she wanted counter space.

3 Bedrooms, 2 baths. We still have 2 kids at home plus a room for us so 3 bedrooms. 2 baths because we don't want to share a bathroom with the kids. In our apartment, everyone but myself shares a shower and that gets hard on occasion. If we had to settle for 1 bathroom we could have but we really wanted 2.

A ranch style home. Between Cheri's back and MS, stairs are getting harder and harder for her to do so we wanted a ranch just so there were no stairs. Plus I'm fat and old so there's that.

It had to be in a certain school district. We didn't want to change the kids schools, they both love where they are and we do as well.

That's it, which to us wasn't a lot. Out of those 4 things, the hardest one to fill was the last one. The school district we wanted to live in just isn't very big and when houses go up for sale, they go quick. It's the best school in that county by far. After spending a few months searching and not coming up with 1 house that fit that criteria, we started to look at having a modular built. We found land that we wanted, it was good location in the district, it was cheaper than most of the land so we checked into that.

The first thing we found out was our credit scores need to be even higher for a construction loan. So we starting working on getting our scores up again. This took a few months, again. When we were finally approved to build, the lot we wanted sold the week before. Any other land in the district we were willing to live, was double the price so now the home we had picked out to build wasn't fitting into the budget because the land was costing more.

Cheri still looked online every so often for homes to buy and she finally ran across one that we thought might fit our needs. She walked through it with my mom while I was at work and fell in love. I went through it the next day and approved (not that I would have said no) and we started on the paperwork to put in an offer.

That was about a month ago. Today, we are slowly packing up so we will be ready to move when we sign at our closing at the end of the year.

So we will start 2016 in our new home. 3 years later, we will fulfill the only resolution we've had for the last few years.

Congratulations. That is a lot of hard work to buy a house. I am at the other end of that circle. Since Richard died I am thinking about selling the one that I live in. I should lay out all of my wants and needs (like you did) and start looking at where I want to live.